Updating:Update on a schedule that works for you. Don't give yourself a hard time when you need a break.

Advice (general):Everyone loves to give it, not all of it is useful or even correct.The things that you may be criticized the most for may end up being the things that are most notable about the work.Listen to advice, but don't follow it all.

As an artist, decide whether you are an illustrator or a story teller. Illustrators focus on the craft, and take a lot of time getting the details right. You'd aim for maybe once a week , or every other month, and create the most beautiful pages possible.

Storytellers have a story to tell, and don't have time for all of that. Learn how to draw fast, find shortcuts, not focus on perfecting transitional panels, learn the art of the focal point. Most readers spend maybe 3-8 seconds on a panel, if they are slowing down to read the text.

You can aim for a nice middle point between the two extremes, but that is usually a result of experience.

Pick a schedule you can stick to. Revise it if necessary. Leave slack in it. My official schedule for Rita was "aim for two pages a week, don't fret if life gets in the way", which left a lot of room for things like "this page needs to be really complicated" or "I had to drop everything to deal with a family medical emergency". That wasn't just the schedule I kept myself to; it was what I posted on the website for my readers to see. And once I adopted that schedule I never felt the slightest bit of guilt about getting "behind", because I never was. (I still mostly cranked out pages two a week until I got to the super-complicated one at the end that took six months to draw!)

If you're running late, never draw an "apology" installment. Because if you only have, say, thirty minutes of energy today, do you want to use it on actually pushing the ongoing story forwards, even if it's just reading a big chunk and thinking about what needs to happen next, or do you want to use it on something you'll throw away when you collect it all?

If you're running late, never draw an "apology" installment. Because if you only have, say, thirty minutes of energy today, do you want to use it on actually pushing the ongoing story forwards, even if it's just reading a big chunk and thinking about what needs to happen next, or do you want to use it on something you'll throw away when you collect it all?

^^^ This a million times! If you're having trouble hitting the update schedule, stick to blog entries to keep people updated, or guest art if you can get it. Don't spend precious bits of productive time/energy on something that you really ought to remove from the archive as soon as you have a regular comic page finished anyway.

Related to the above, please do remove all such filler art from the comic archive-- if not the minute it's replaced by a story update, then after a certain period of time has elapsed (like a couple of months, just clean out all that stuff). Few things break me out of my immersion in a story quite as effectively as constantly being interrupted by cheery christmas/new year's/halloween/sorry I'm late/etc filler art while I'm hitting 'next' trying to find out what happens next.

If you're proud of it, you can set up a separate gallery for people to browse through it (or maybe share a couple of little extras at the end of each chapter or at good story break-points), but it shouldn't just live in the regular archive indefinitely.

Few things break me out of my immersion in a story quite as effectively as constantly being interrupted by cheery christmas/new year's/halloween/sorry I'm late/etc filler art while I'm hitting 'next' trying to find out what happens next.

"Hitting next" reminds me of another thing:

Figure out what the Smallest Unit of Satisfying Reading is for your comic. If you're doing a daily strip, maybe it's a single strip. If you're doing single-page gags than maybe it's a page. But if you're doing a Sprawling Adventure Story, is it really satisfying to read one page, then have to scroll to the 'next' link, wait for the next page to load, scroll past the banner, etc? Maybe the SUoSR for that kind of story is the chapter. I've been moving to a chapter-oriented presentation and am loving it.

(Caveat: if you're relying on ads to fund your work, switching to a chapter-oriented presentation is going to cut the number of pageloads and ads served way down.)

Figure out what the Smallest Unit of Satisfying Reading is for your comic. If you're doing a daily strip, maybe it's a single strip. If you're doing single-page gags than maybe it's a page. But if you're doing a Sprawling Adventure Story, is it really satisfying to read one page, then have to scroll to the 'next' link, wait for the next page to load, scroll past the banner, etc? Maybe the SUoSR for that kind of story is the chapter. I've been moving to a chapter-oriented presentation and am loving it.

I agree with that, when it feels more natural. Not just from a reader's perspective, but from a maker's: I always find it much more efficient and focused to do the pencils/inking/colouring for an entire scene (as in not changing place or time) at a time, rather than the one page from scratch every week. It may mean putting two days aside, but it's always a fraction of the total time spent on getting my mind back in the story, getting my penciling mojo on, setting up the scanner, figuring out the colours again, etc.

Wellp, I typically think "What the hell do I know?" But I'll get over that hangup for the time being and add my two cents for what they're worth.

The biggest thing is to just draw and begin doing it on a regular basis. Set a schedule and strive to keep it no matter what, and just let things happen on the page as you go, by which I mean, allow yourself room to develop as you go, because you will. My experience with 6-Commando has been that, mainly, and I owe my friend Robert a huge debt of gratitude on that score, since he was the one who told me to stop thinking and planning and just pick a story, start drawing it, and see it through. That was 250 pages ago so that was good advice.

And after that I'd say, at least for me, if you have an urge to destroy what you e been working on and start over, you should resist it. Sometimes everyone needs to call an audible and make a change of direction, but in my experience, 99 times out of 100 it's not a sign that anything is bad, just that you're too close to what you're doing and need to step back for a while. Taking a break or sleeping on it will clear out the jumble and give you renewed perspective. Draw as well as you can all the time and don't let momentary frustration lead you to rash or impetuous acts, or worse, to discouragement.

Oh, and one more thing I'll add - people will both love and hate your comic and you can't control that. People will feel awfully free to criticize you in often very harsh and contradictory ways, and that's just the nature of the web. Don't let it deter you. For example, at the same time I was once being ridiculed by a Russian language forum for some embarrassing mistakes I was making with my use of the language, I was also receiving angry emails from Anerican readers demanding that I never use Russian as it was an insult to Emglish-speakers. What was I to do? Keep calm and move on. An acerbic or defensive attitude will only make it worse, and the best phrase I've found for such situations is "Well, I'll try to do better next time." It's even true, even if not in terms of trying to make an offended reader happy.

Someone asked me for advice on this topic on tumblr a while back. I'll paste what I think is the most important bit here.

"Something that I think is very important is that you must feel self-validated in making your comic. A lot of people start long-term creative projects hoping to be validated by an audience, creative peers, or perhaps financially, but no matter what the quality of your work, there’s no guarantee that you’re ever going to get that outside validation. Long-term webcomics are a significant investment of time and effort that you may never capitalize on in the form of anything that can be measured with real-world numbers. You need to be the one that believes in your comic the most even if you fear that no else believes in it, and you have to be its #1 fan and cheerleader. It can be a lonely thing, at least for a while, but if you keep at it consistently, readers and other support will appear in time. If you believe in your project and don’t need outside approval, the patience for that will come."

Easier said than done -- at least for me -- and while it's something that I've always felt was important, it's something I wish I had at the forefront of my mind when I started.

I'm quoting this for emphasis. I see a very common denominator in expressions of low self esteem among webcomic creators when I browse different forums and I get the impression that some people's comics are about a form of self-validation. Making a comic isn't going to solve this problem though and perhaps the person needs to instead deal with what's really causing the self-esteem issues and work with that. I feel like I couldn't have done this when I was a teenager because my brittle self wouldn't have been able to handle it. I'm more confident now and I get the impression that you need to be confident to make it long-term in webcomics.

Some things I've thought about for myself in my short career in webcomicking:

- do it for yourself. This relates to the above point. It's ok to be egotistical in this regard (you can be without being an ass). But you have to enjoy yourself and what you're doing. Especially if you're starting up. There will be times when it'll feel like a chore. Make that enjoyable (I look at quick looks of video games in my periphery to get me started sometimes). Sure you'll be showing the comic off to others, but it should be the stuff you'd want to read.

- story trumps art. This was said to me by Peter Bergting, author and creator of a number of comics (Swedish and American). What he meant was that a good story can carry bad art but it's more difficult the other way around. I sort of embraced this especially since I didn't have any drawing experience prior to making my comic but was confident in my story. Preferably, you'll want both but I'd say the writing is more important. Especially if you're starting out with little experience like me.

- structure. This applies to both setting aside time for when you work on your comic. Have your own timeframes. Prep work like scripts, storyboards, overall story structure. I've set a limit to my own comic akin to that of a standard 22 page issue, to give me boundaries to work within. This forces me to also give my comic boundaries and I'd like to think it makes me more effective.

A lot of other smart things have already been said. Like knowing CSS/HTML to some extent. I only recently learned that when trying to set up my website...

i've been curating a collection of bits of advice, anecdotes, techniques, tips/tricks, etc, from comic creators and other artists. i've posted the collection on tumblr for folks to peruse and hopefully draw some inspiration from like i have.

the tumblr is called campaign against cliche - it's not really an ongoing tumblr, but literally something i just published in response to this thread.